Silent pivoting: listening for the inaudible in the Remote University

Abstract

One word defined academic life during the pandemic: pivoting. It means more than hinging on an idea or an action – pivoting also suggests turning to something or changing direction. Across the world, the academy quickly pivoted to remote teaching and learning during the 2019–2020 academic year (UNESCO 2021), but who was left behind in the process? In the case of mental health, pivoting was partly audible: faculty discussed burnout, changing the direction of the conversation to exhaustion; students articulated their struggles with technology, turning to hopelessness and a range of other emotions; and staff voiced concerns about stress, hinging on their vulnerability to it; these issues, of course, were not mutually-exclusive, nor were they new, despite an increase in resonance. However, pivoting was also inaudible: countless voices were silent or silenced. If COVID-19 taught us anything, it was the importance of listening to faculty, students, and staff who were not heard.* One example from each group in Germany, Bangladesh, and the United Kingdom, respectively, will demonstrate the argument that silent pivoting, defined here as quiet yet consequential mental-physical action, presents an equal opportunity to support wellness practices, largely because silence can lead to transformation (Ochoa Gautier 2015). As scholars of sound, we would do well to study such practices because of our shared interest in inaudible and audible forms of human expression. Faculty verbalised their emotional exhaustion. Researchers surveyed approximately 100 German professors about their burnout, among other issues. When faculty perceived the pandemic’s effect on their teaching as a threat, they were more likely to experience high levels of burnout (Daumiller et al. 2021). Most of the participants in the small sample did not have an appreciable amount of online teaching experience. How, then, could we hear the voices of professors with significant online experience, many of whom quietly took mentalphysical action that proved consequential for their students, such as creating new lesson plans for remote instruction? What did their burnout sound like, particularly in comparison to colleagues at other institutions? The inaudible status of the voices left out of published research signals a different kind of sonic politics in the academy, where there are real differences in privilege, prestige, and power. As Attali (2003) wrote, “ . . . the institutionalization of the silence of others assure[s] the durability of power” (8). Without an equal distribution of resources across the landscape of higher education, data related to faculty burnout naturally will be selective rather than representative. Of course, one must not generalise from a survey administered at an R1 doctoral university to a liberal arts baccalaureate college. Instead, we need to hear from faculty with varying levels of online teaching experience about the burnout they experienced at all types of institutions. In response, we may find that wellness-based solutions to exhaustion change the direction of the conversation to engagement. In addition to faculty, students shared stories about their mental health and access to technology. They turned to many emotions, such as hopelessness, in response to their situations (COVID-19 Global Student Survey 2020). In Bangladesh, a tragic story of